human potential

I walked up to the little cafeteria at one end of the building, ordered two sausage sandwiches and a coffee. Too dark, too small, to be attractive as a place to eat. I took my food outside, and ate it sitting on a loading dock at 4:15 a.m., looking at the moon, thinking of nothing in particular.

This summer wouldn’t much resemble the one before. There was all the difference in the world between living on your own and living in your father’s house. Also between working in a congressman’s office – no matter how trivial the work – and working in a glass factory. Between nights spent slinging the bull on the steps of the fraternity house and nights spent throwing boxes. Between being in a city with all its opportunities, and being nowhere doing nothing.

volunteer congressional assistant !

I looked around at the lamplit stone and asphalt, and remembered the night at Dave Segal’s apartment, the first (and, as it turned out, the only) time he had invited me over . “I’ve got a new Beatles album you have got to hear,” he had said, with great emphasis. I hadn’t been a big Beatles fan. I had loathed their early teeny-bopper music, and had been quite surprised to find that most people in college were crazy about them. Also, I couldn’t remember ever talking about music to Dave. Why did he choose me?

The album was “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” not yet a cultural sensation. (Leave it to Seagal to get in on the ground floor.)  Dave had lit up a couple of candles and a stick of incense, and we sat in the darkened room and drank his wine and listened. As he had forewarned, one cut faded directly into the next without the customary pause. We listened to the entire side, and Dave got up to flip the record and we listened to the other side. An hour, call it. Not much time.

Break time was over. I walked back into the building, stuffing the coffee container and the papers form the sandwich into a trash can. As usual, all the lines were backed up, and it took several minutes to clear them.

“To tell the truth, Dave, a lot of it I couldn’t understand. I liked it, pretty much, but some of it was pretty strange.”

Segal had smiled. “That’s because you don’t have the key.” (And that was Segal, always ready to demonstrate how much of a man of the world he was. Well, compared to me, to what I knew of the world, it was easy enough.) I said, “So what’s the key? It isn’t in the liner notes.”

He had laughed his slightly mocking (and self-mocking) laugh. “No, it isn’t in the liner notes.” After I waited him out, he said, “Acid. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, get it? LSD. ‘I’d love to turn you on.’ It’s as plain as anything, once you have the key.”

And, as soon as he said it, it was clear. And then he had leaned forward earnestly. “The point is, I’ve got some, and it’s dynamite. Want to try it?”

I shook my head, remembering, and moved on to another lehr. I remember being unsurprised that Dave used drugs. It fit with his somewhat self-consciously bohemian lifestyle. And I suppose I was flattered that he thought I might an interesting person to get high with. But then, maybe he merely thought my reactions would be amusing. In any case, I told him, I didn’t think it was for me.

Segal, all energy and sweet reason, was sitting forward now. The candles made little highlights on his eyeglasses. “But if you haven’t tried it, how can you know? Frank, I’m telling you, this stuff is tremendous.”

“It’s also illegal.”

He brushed that aside. “So is off-track betting. So is speeding. So was drinking, during prohibition. So what?” I wasn’t about to say I didn’t want to risk getting arrested. And anyway, that wasn’t it. The fact was, the stuff scared me. I told Segal that doing drugs “wasn’t my thing,” and doing one’s own thing was as close to a universal commandment as college kids recognized.  But it didn’t stop Segal, or even slow him down. He was always different, even in his non-conformity. “Frank, you don’t believe the stuff you read, do you? Believe me, if I didn’t think it was safe, I wouldn’t fool with it.”

I was getting tired now. Maybe the sausage was slowing me down, but more likely it was the time of night. The hour before dawn was always hard. The boundaries between world blurred. I knew full well where I was, but the inner stage was a little more brightly lit, the outer a little less so. I saw boxes and strapping tape and the day’s first pale light coming through the distant windows. But mentally, I saw Segal and me in his apartment, discussing the pros and cons of drugs in general and acid in particular. And how much separated the two scenes? A few weeks, a few hours on the road, and certain incommunicable differences in background, income, prospects, outlooks, desires….

Maybe if I had understood that when I first went to college, I would have gotten along better.

 

The summers I turned 16 and 17, I had loaded and unloaded trucks and tractor trailers at the produce auction, half a mile from grandmom’s house. I would walk there every day after work, waiting for dad to pick me up. One memorable sunny August afternoon in 1963 and I had sat in her living room watching President Kennedy announce that “yesterday, a shaft of light cut into the darkness,” referring to the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban treaty.

Other times, I had come in for cookies and milk after plowing or discing or cultivating, and had sat and told grandmom of things I had been reading about. Earlier yet, I had been one of the 15 grandchildren who filled her house with noise and motion on her birthday and on some holidays. And before even that, back in the early fifties, my older brother and sister and I would sometimes come in, cold and wet from picking daffodils for the cut-flower trade, and grandmom would fix us hot chocolate. And cookies. She always urged cookies on you as if they were something good for you that you ate too infrequently.

Several lehrs down, a couple of people were arguing about something. I could see the hostile postures, could hear the angry sound, if not the words. I watched them for a moment, mildly curious, then turned back to my work.

I’d almost killed myself, one day, plowing. The plow had a three-point hitch, meaning that it hooked two chains to the hydraulic lifts at the back of the tractor, while the tongue attached directly below the seat, held in place by a pin, which was secured in turn by a cotter pin. One day, as I was plowing, the cotter pin got out, the pin worked loose, the tongue dropped and dug itself into the ground, and the rear end of the plow came flying up and forward toward my head. The tongue dug itself almost vertically into the ground, stopping the plow from going forward the few inches it would have needed to brain me. The tractor was shivering and bucking, its wheels still churning, until I put in the clutch. I backed it out, and the plow tongue came out of the ground undamaged. Walking back, I found the pin lying atop the furrow, rather than being buried beneath the earth, as I had feared. I never did find the cotter pin, but no harm, no foul, and I had a story to tell about the hazards of farming. But who would I have told? My fraternity brothers, coming out of their suburban backgrounds?

It occurred to me, rhythmically throwing boxes, that what I was doing wasn’t so different from most jobs where you worked with your hands. Most jobs had a groove, and the hardest part was finding it and settling into it. Like mixing mud, which I had been doing for the past few days.

Dad was renovating one of the farm buildings, and one aspect of the job was plastering the two-story exterior. He hired a couple of men, and he conscripted my cousin Warren and me as free labor. The three men did the plastering. Warren and I mixed the plaster (which everybody called mud) and kept it coming to them as they were ready for it.

There’s nothing particularly difficult about mixing mud: so much cement, so much sand, so much water from the hose. Dad’s cement-mixer had died long ago, so Warren and I  mixed by hand, pouring the materials into a six-foot by four-foot by one-foot slope-sided metal box, raking the stuff forward and back forward and back, using an oversized hoe with two large holes in the blade. We would mix and get a batch ready, then put it in a bucked tied to a rope attached to a pulley at roof level. We would swing the bucket of mud up to the men on the scaffold and they would empty it into a tray and we’d lover the bucket and refill it. Nothing fancy, but there was a rhythm to it. We had to mix the mud soon enough that they would have it when they needed it, but not too soon, or it would begin to harden. Since mixing took a good while, we had to start the next batch before the previous batch was used up. That meant piling the available mud at one end and the new materials at the other, trying to keep the water from flowing into the old batch so it wouldn’t’ get soupy.

My relief man arrived again, chatty as ever. “Lunch. Twenty minutes.”

One day drinking with my friends to celebrate the end of finals. The next day, starting a three-day job mixing mud at the farm. Two days after that, back at the factory.

 

How long did it take, really, to clean off a roller, even when it was full? A minute of double-time? Forty seconds? Not long. I cleared off the backlog and had time enough to stack three boxes from the slow line, the medicine bottles. By the time the towmotor had removed the full pallet and had left an empty,, that line was backed up a little, but it was just a matter of keeping an eye on things.

I’d never realized how different our backgrounds were till I saw Dave see the house I’d grown up in. I couldn’t envision his home, but I could nee what it must not have looked like. It brought me back to the Thanksgiving when I had invited Dennis home for the holiday, and he had driven us up. On the Friday night, I had brought him to the factory I’d worked at we had gotten in and out without being challenged, and in a few minutes it had shown him a world he’d never seen. “Puts a whole new light on my Thanksgiving,” he had said. Like me, he was working his way through college, but his father was paying his tuition, and he had no factories in his background.

The boxes came down the lines. I stacked them according to the posted patterns; tied up the completed stacks; began again. I was fully into an easy rhythm now, swinging from line to line, almost enjoying the newly familiar strain on muscles that had gotten unused to that kind of workout. By the end of the first shift, I’d be tired. For the first couple of days, maybe a week, I’d be sore. Then it would be as before.

No factories in their backgrounds. No farms, either. What Dave had said was true, I was different in dress and action and attitude. No wonder I was struggling. But it was hard to see what could be done about it. Should I make my life into a  long Halloween, with me always in costume?

I had been working about an hour and a half when my relief came. “Break time,” he said. “Ten minutes.” I nodded, knowing the drill. Every night one man spent the night going from man to man, relieving each in turn. I didn’t know this guy, and he clearly considered me just another college boy home for the summer, nobody worth exchanging a friendly word with. I went off to the rest room, and when I got back, he was gone and all three lines were stacked up. He hadn’t bothered to clean off the slow line even once. Nothing new there. I had never come back to find my lines cleaned off. It took about three and a half minutes of quick work to clear things.

“But if I don’t fit in at college, I don’t fit in at home anymore either.” Said silently, part of a long night’s argument.

I’d seen it on my first day home. Dad had had work to do at the farm, and had asked me – which amounted to telling me – to go along. So I had put on some old clothes and had ridden shotgun in his old GMC truck to the farm, which was  a few miles away. We didn’t have much to say to each other. What could I have talked about? Hearing “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in Dave Segal’s apartment? Our fraternity house winning Most Improved House trophy? The irritating difference between life as my own man and life as a dependent in dad’s household?

Naturally, we first stopped in to see grandmom. Her eyes lit up behind her glasses, and I was hugged and kissed and fed with home-baked cookies from her pantry, and a glass of milk, just as if I were still a kid. She asked how school was going, and I gave the best non-answer I could think of. I had been so depressed that Spring that I had felt like dropping out, so depressed that for days on end it had become too great a bother to go to class. How could have had told her, or told dad, any of that? They’d have asked why, and I didn’t know why. Or, more likely, they would have said it was silly to be depressed at my age, with no family, no responsibilities to worry me. Think of all the people with real problems, they would have said. And at that, can’t say they would have been wrong to say it. The only thing is, it didn’t help.

Only two hours down, six to go, an eternity. And this only the first night of elven weeks of this. I reached for the cardboard to box up another stack.

I liked grandmom, and admired her. She had received little formal education, but she understood the world she lived in much better than I did mine. Years later, I would read of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s old age, connected to neighbors, town, family and countryside, and I would recognize grandmom’s life. But liking was one thing, relating was another. My new world of classes and fraternity and big-city life was something far from her experience, and I had no confidence in my ability to bring it to her, or to dad. Only decades later would I realize, I never made the attempt.

 

I could vaguely remember how hectic my days had been, my first week on this job two years before. But as soon as I began to throw boxes, I was back in the groove. The job wasn’t pleasant, exactly – too much noise, too much dust, too many echoes of last time – but within minutes I had reduced it to repetitive motion and petty decision-making, and my mind was free to roam.

Seeing dad’s house through Dave’s eyes was quite a revelation. We had driven into the driveway, that weekday morning, and I had gone in by the side door, and had been disappointed to find nobody home.

“Doesn’t your family lock the door when they go out?”

“This isn’t D.C., Dave.”

“I guess not. Well, let’s get your stuff out of the car so I can get on my way.” He had helped carry my trunk into the living room, and I had seen him glance around, and suddenly I saw it as he saw it: an old house, kind of dark, with old furniture, not stylish or modern. Not very middle class.

He had been gone within 10 minutes, as soon as I sketched out the easiest way back to the Turnpike. Probably he’d have left immediately, no matter what the house looked like, unless my mother had been there to offer him a cup of coffee and a slice of cake. He was anxious to get to his aunt’s in North Jersey, where he would leave the car before flying off to Iowa for the summer. He didn’t want to stay, he wanted to get home, nothing more.

But still—

I stacked the last box up above my head, and got one of the eight-foot sheets of corrugated cardboard off the stack. I bent it to wrap around one side and two corners of the stack, and leaned it there. I pulled off four double armlengths of strapping tape from the spool. I fixed the wire clip to one end of the tape, hooked it onto one end of the cardboard, and carried the tape around the stack, back to the clip. I pulled the clip off the cardboard, fed the free end of the tape through the clip and tightened it just enough to hold the cardboard loosely in place at the top.

Dave had been looking out the window at the Maryland countryside as I took my turn driving. “You might think about how you dress,” he’d said finally. “That kind of thing is important to girls.”

Doing 75 on the interstate didn’t require any particular attention, with mid-morning traffic so sparce. I had glanced over and seen his half-apologetic expression. “You think that would do it?”

A year of living in the same house had showed us that we spoke the same language, that differences between us were superficial rather than essential. Still, Dave seemed to hesitate, his voice came out very soft.  “Of course it won’t do it, but it would help.” When I asked what would  do it, and had repeated the question,, he’d said I dressed too old and acted too old. I had thought about it as we drove along, trying to get the sense of it.

I got the second cardboard, placed it against the stack’s opposite side, bent it into place. I slipped the top under the tape I’d left loose, then pulled the tape taut, snapping it twice to tighten it. I measured off another length of tape, cut it, hooked the clip to the bottom of the cardboard, walked the tape around, fixed the clip and tightened it, leaving the stack ready for pickup. Then I moved quickly to the next lehr, which was beginning to stack up.

I’d known what he meant, all right. From the very first days of Freshman year, I had realized that I was different from those round me. I wasn’t much given to introspection – in fact, painful high school years had taught me not to consider how others might react to me. I had learned to live within myself, in my own mind, my own room. But surely I’d gone beyond all that? Yet here was Dave, whose judgment I trusted, telling me I was still different.

“But Dave,” I had said, “what am I suppose to do? I am who I am. I can’t change that. Is it going to do any good to pretend I’m something I’m not?”

Dave was always reasonable. “Look, DeMarco, you asked the question. I can’t help it if you don’t like the answer.”

 

I went through the gate with dozens of others. We walked down the long asphalted driveway past the great oppressive brick buildings. Groups peeled off to enter the doors nearest their time clocks; just another workday. I didn’t recognize anybody, and walked in silence, falling back into reacting to the remembered surroundings.

I knew what door to enter, I knew how to find my time clock, I knew what part of the wire rack to search for my time card. Cards for new hires were always several cards to a slot, in the upper lefthand corner. I paged through them, and took the card with my name inked in. (Next cycle, my name would be included in the typed cards.) I knew to punch in at once, eight minutes before the shift began. The company wouldn’t pay for minutes before the shift began, but it would dock you for punching in even a minute after the hour. Along with others, but alone, I waited for midnight, wondering how long it would take me to re-accustom myself to the peculiarities of the factory: what it looked like, sounded like, smelled like, felt like. I stood there metaphorically on the brink, and then at midnight, I walked down to the three lehrs assigned to me for the shift. For the next eight hours – minus two ten minute breaks on either side of a twenty-minute “lunch” break – I’d be coupled to those three production lines.

In the glass house hundreds of feet away, the great gas-fed furnaces had turned sand and additives into a pool of molten glass. That molten glass came flowing out of its container, high above the work floor, like white-hot toothpaste squeezed from a tube, flashing down red-hot metal tracks toward the molds below. The glass began to cool even as it traveled, changing from white glowing orange to dull red. As it fell, the tube was snipped into precise lengths, and shunted into alternate tracks, each length falling into a metal mold. Behind it, a hollow rod blew compressed air into the mold’s center, forcing the molten glass against the sides and bottom of the mold. Thus the container’s exterior was shaped by the mold and its interior was shaped by the compressed air forcing it evenly against the mold. Then the two sides of the mold sprang apart, and the tube was withdrawn from the top.

Sometimes incomplete bottles were formed, or sometimes they stuck to the mold, or perhaps the reaching mechanical fingers missed the neck and shattered the bottle, or knocked it over. Whatever the mess, it was fixed remotely. Nobody was going to fool with that mechanism at those temperatures, not even with asbestos gloves.

All this happened mechanically, in staccato movements at quick-time. Forming the bottle was the work of an instant. A pair of clamps descended, grasped the new bottle at the neck, picked it up, and placed it onto a metal conveyor belt for its long cool-down journey.

If you were to expose a newly created glass container to normal room temperatures, it would become uselessly brittle, if it didn’t shatter outright. Instead, you need to anneal it. The line that carried the new container from the mold conveyed it directly into a lehr, or cooling oven. At the furnace end, the lehr matched the temperature that had created the container. As the ware traveled, it moved into cooler temperatures. By the time it arrived at the far end, several hundred feet and perhaps 10 hours later, it was only slightly warm to the touch.

At that far end, humans again formed links in the chain. Employees, mostly women, lined up at either side of the conveyer belt, standing with cardboard cartons ready. As the ware came out, they plucked up the good bottles and packed them. As they filled the boxes, they slid them onto roller trays beside them, and the boxes slid the few feet to a dead end at a lower level. Three of those dead ends would be my station for the shift. Usually you got two fast lehrs — lines running large bottles that quickly filled the boxes – and one slow lehr, perhaps medicine bottles packed a gross to a carton.

As the boxes came down, I’d load them onto pallets according to the stacking diagram for that particular kind of box. When I had packed the boxes to the indicated height – six to eight rows, usually – I’d wrap two cardboard sheets around opposite sides and corners, and would strap it up with plastic strapping tape and metal clips. Forklift trucks would come by, drop an empty pallet, and take away the full one. I’d drag the empty pallet into place and start again. Rinse and repeat, for eight hours.

As I got to my station this first night, I saw that as usual the man I was relieving had let things stack up a little. By the end of your shift, you’re counting minutes, and you know that for the guy just starting his shift, a little catch-up activity gets him into the rhythm of it. Familiar territory.

 

After my year in unskilled-labor limbo, I did finally go off to college, and those years did change my life. But in the middle of that transformation, I spent the summer before my junior year back in South Jersey, doing shift-work at the glass factory I had left two years earlier. Two years earlier, I had watched the college boys come into the factory for the summer to make money for the next year’s expenses. Now I was one of them, and yet I wasn’t at all sure that this, or something like it, would not be my future.

You might think that someone already halfway through his college years would know that upon graduation he was going to move into another world. But I had no way to imagine life post-college. I was going through college the way I had gone through all my schooling, following arbitrary and inescapable rules, being carried along in a current: drifting. I didn’t have sense enough or initiative enough to seek counseling. Instead, I sleepwalked. So I couldn’t imagine what might follow college.

Years later, in a never-to-be-completed nonfiction novel I was going to title Graduation, I wrote up my state of mind that long solitary transitional summer, and I offer it here as a window into the mind of that boy, who was on the verge of so many changes in the summer he turned 21.

&&&

1. First Shift

During the two years that I’d been away from the glass factory, the external mechanism – the vast compound of human beings and machinery and brick and glass that was the factory – had continued to function as it had long before I’d first arrived. I’d expected that it would. What surprised me was that a corresponding internal mechanism had remained in existence when I had left for school. Apparently it had slept, unnoticed, within me, biding its time.

That internal mechanism began to awaken at quarter past 11 p.m., as I put on the dungarees, the flannel shirt, the old shoes, that was my uniform for a summer of throwing boxes. It stretched, limbered up, as I found a spot and parked mom’s car in the second of the  three sprawling parking lots – full, as always a shift-change time — and stepped out of the car at 11:45 and looked across the street at the glass plant.

There it was, a great clump of interconnected one- and two-story buildings, dominated by the 40- or 50-foot high glass house that was the heart of the place. The office-building windows were dark, of course, at midnight, and those of the mold shop. But the packing house windows were lighted, and light came from the doors open to the night. Spotlights lighting the asphalt driveways showed me a towmotor truck carrying a full pallet to the great barn-like room where loads accumulated before being shipped out in tractor-trailers or railroad boxcars. Mainly, I saw the orange glow – 40 or 50 feet in the air – as seen through the windows far above the glasshouse floor.

I hadn’t even yet gotten inside the fence, and it was all coming back. I could hear the muted roar of the furnaces, could sense the pervasive presence of dirt. could hear the whining hum and electrical clicks of the battery-powered forklift trucks, and the clatter and rattle of glass jars and bottle being packed into boxes, and the jouncing of fully-packed boxes sliding down metal roller trays. I could hear snatches of half-shouted conversation among human pieces of the vast machine. It all came back, so clearly. Reason for dismay.

The midnight-to-eight shift would be my first since I had quit to go to college two years earlier. The good thing was, it would be the first in only a limited number of shifts before I would quit again and return to college. I was only summer help. I would be getting out of here again. Surely that would make a difference.

Surely it would, but that assurance did not make it any easier to walk across the parking lot and across the street and through the open gate in the eight-foot-high iron fence. I knew hat I was returning to, and I wasn’t entirely sure I would ever really escape. Escape was what college supposedly was all about, but when all was said and done and attended and paid for, would it really make the difference? Or would I gravitate, from lack of better opportunities, back into this constricted world?

I had had that question on my mind the week before, as I had been driven home by my friend Dave Schlachter, but I hadn’t talked about it. Dave would have dismissed the fear out of hand, finding the idea inconceivable. But he hadn’t come out of the world of manual labor, and managerial disdain and short paychecks. You don’t fear returning to something you never knew.

I had wondered: Was I going back for a final look at a life I was about to leave forever? Or was it a reminder that what I was trying to leave behind would be waiting for me when escape came to an end? I felt like T.E. Lawrence, pacing up and down in front of the recruiter’s station, nerving himself up to sell himself into uniformed slavery for a term of years.

But, it had to be done. To return to school, I had to have money. To get it, I had to save as much as I could. That meant living at home and working fulltime, with as much overtime as I could handle. So here I was, re-entering Armstrong Glass Company at a few minutes to midnight on the Thursday after my return from D.C.

 

It wasn’t unheard of for college-bound kids to spend the summer after high school doing factory work. What was unusual was for one to remain there after the new school year began.

In the weeks when I was unloading trucks, I hadn’t really seen the factory beyond the room adjacent to the loading docks, where we cleaned the machinery after the last of the trucks were unloaded. But when I went from temporary to full time, I moved into yet another world. The factory floor was dark, one huge two-story room, with adjoining locker rooms, relatively dimly lit by overhead fluorescent lighting. The walls, which had no windows, were concrete block. The floors, also concrete, were grimy from the tracks left by the forklifts, and often wet after being hosed down to remove that grime.

I was as out of place among the factory workers as I had been in high school. Within the factory there was a rigid if unspoken class distinction. The offices, housed in a separate building, were the civilian equivalent of Officers Country, populated by the executive and secretarial staff, coat-and-tie people, white and apparently educated, whose day’s work left them clean. You would think I belonged among them, and perhaps I did, but I certainly didn’t identify with them.

The people I worked among were Negroes, and Puerto Ricans, and poor whites from exotic places like West Virginia and rural Virginia or Kentucky.  They were a long way from the bottom of the heap: They were holding down steady jobs, and had a stable place in the world they knew. But in those days, TV never portrayed Negroes or Puerto Ricans nor poor whites.  I had known some migrant farm laborers, and some of my father’s tenants. But this was the first time I saw how the other half lived.

Any class structure is more clearly seen when looking upward from the lower decks. It was as though something wanted me to see the world from that angle, before I left home. It was a far cry from anything I knew, and a far cry from anything I would see in college.

I try to remember that time and I have only a few memories.

• Old Bob, at least he seemed old to me, a grizzled black man, entertaining those around him in the locker rook with his unending series of humorous, R-rated stories and sayings.
• The very slight casual friendships I struck up with a couple of boys more or less my age, Harold and Doug, brothers from someplace out of state. I wonder sometimes what happened to them.
• Continually playing over my head, trying to do the simple jobs I was assigned as the newest and least skilled person there.
• Mostly, the paddles. How I ached! Certain kinds of soup could not be stirred by electric mixer, but still required continuous stirring while they cooked. I was given a six- or seven-foot long aluminum paddle, and set on a metal platform, and assigned to do the stirring as they cooked. Half an hour at a time, perhaps, 1200 gallons at a time, and then another kettle, same thing., all night with only a break for a meal. Toward the end of the night, I would need to throw my weight on the paddle to keep on stirring, because my arm muscles by themselves wouldn’t do it any more. By the end of that long winter, I had developed considerable upper-body strength, and I never lost it. But I had paid for those muscles!

It was a bleak time. I had nothing I wanted to do, beyond getting through week after week I would go to work in the afternoon, get home sometime after midnight, sleep for a while, waste the few hours of the solitary day, and go back to work. In March came a big layoff, for reasons management never bothered to explain.  (I remember taking a certain pleasure in finding a pencil and correcting the ungrammatical misspelled notice they posted on the bulletin board, but I was still laid off.) A couple of months later, i hired on at  a nearby glass factory, employed at casual labor, doing the odd jobs that had to be done, but weren’t worth detailing shift-workers to do. After a while, a few college boys came in to work for the summer, visitors from a world I hadn’t yet seen.

I can’t remember which factory i was referring to, but years later, my mother reminded me that at some point i had said to her,  “Mom, these poor people! i don’t know how they can stand it.”

i still don’t.

People without marketable skills and without education basically sold their lives, one shift at a time, to keep body and soul together. “Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” notwithstanding, the work was repetitious, their labor interchangeable,  their job satisfaction mainly their endurance and competence. Their function was to be cogs in a vast machine. there was satisfaction in not causing the machine to jam up, but that’s about it. Not much job satisfaction there.

Oh, did I mention that management tended to treat them like children? Did I mention that this is a great temptation to live down to expectations? Experiencing this world, not as a college boy working a summer job but as a high school graduate with few social or mechanical skills and no self-confidence, was the best preparation for college I could have received.  A couple of years later, a friend drove me home for Thanksgiving and I showed him the factory floor as it looked to the factory worker. It was an eye-opener to this son of a music teacher. “It puts a new light on my Thanksgiving,” he said.